Little Saigon by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Frye was sure that Nha's screaming and the sirens wailing in his own eardrums were enough to bring down the walls. Come down, he thought, come down and bury us and make this all untrue. "

Little Saigon (1987) is yet another novel in my new literary déjà-vu project. I am re-reading books by T. Jefferson Parker, an Edgar Award winner for Silent Joe, to me the quintessential writer of Southern California crime fiction of the late 1980s to 2000s. This is Mr. Parker's fifth novel that I am reviewing on Goodreads; my previous ratings are very high (for crime fiction): three four-star scores and a three-star one. Alas, this book is clearly the weakest of the five.

Chuck Frye, an aspiring journalist and an ex-reporter fired from Orange County Ledger, has lived his entire life in the shadow of his older brother, Bennett. Bennett, a Vietnam War hero and a very successful businessman, has always been the parents' favorite. Chuck's life has been marked by a string of failures. He is an excellent surfer, but even there his main claim to fame is being only "the second-best surfer of Laguna Beach."

We meet the brothers during a birthday party in Westminster, CA. This Orange County city has the largest Vietnamese population outside of South-East Asia, thus it is called "Little Saigon." Three men armed with machine guns storm the party, there is shooting, and Bennett's wife, a Vietnamese singer, is abducted. Potential connections with national politics emerge - the situation of Vietnamese refugees in California is a touchy issue in the US - Vietnam relations. FBI is involved in the case, yet also connections with local business are suspected.

While the plot in the first three-fourth of the novel develops plausibly I find the last hundred pages or so very disappointing. I value Mr. Parker's writing highly so it hurts me to call the avalanche of twists and turns of the plot moronic, yet it is a fitting term. Why do we need twists and turns in crime novels? It seems to me that Mr. Parker had quite a good novel but then he noticed the absence of plot contortions and added a lot of them, not caring whether they make sense.

Mr. Parker's prose is, as usual, outstanding. In particular, the beginning scenes at the party are beautifully written. So are the surfing scenes, for instance:

"It was a right-top-heavy, cylindrical and adamant, the sweet-spot rifling toward him as he shot through, rose to the lip and aimed back down for a bottom turn of such velocity that thoughts of disaster peeled from his mind and he finished in balls-out rush that sent him and his board rocketing skyward, then down with a splash."

Another outstanding feature of the novel is the author's sense of location. I happen to know Orange County a little and I recognize it on the pages of the novel. I also like the author's pearls of wisdom about politics, for instance:

"Communism. Democracy. We both know by now that they are only words. They are two fat old women fighting over a bowl of rice."

Very, very marginal recommendation because of the ridiculous fourth quarter of the novel.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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